For those who are interested in the field of data journalism but unsure of where to start, The Data Journalism Heist offers a quick introduction. The e-book’s tagline: How to get in, get the data, and get the story out – and make sure nobody gets hurt

When a government shutdown renders government data websites useless, what’s a data journalist to do? This week, reporters hoping to gather data from sites like the US Census Bureau, the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis were out of luck, as access to most online government data was blocked due to the government shutdown.

As is the case with practitioners of most emerging and rapidly expanding fields, data journalists are finding it increasingly necessary to generate a code of sorts to deal with ethical issues and problems. In The Times Regrets the Programmer Error, a newsroom developer at the New York Times asks whether it’s time to create a detailed and explicit corrections policy for data.

And Paul Bradshaw of Birmingham City University imagines what a code of ethics for data journalism would look like. Ethical guidelines are necessary because of the sheer volume of data available in public databases, he says.

Finalists for the Gannett Award for Technical Innovation in Digital Journalism were announced by the Online Journalism Association this week. They were the data visualization tool D3.js; Quartz, a digitally native news site for business people; and Tarbell, a content management system created by the Chicago Tribune News Applications Team (and named after muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell.)

Fun fact: Over the last 2 years, the Buenos Aires delegation of Hacks/Hackers has grown to be the second largest chapter in the world, with more than 2200 members. (New York City is the largest.) This weekend, the city hosts the second annual Media Party, one of the biggest events in the Americas for newsroom programmers and data journalists. Featured guests include NPR news apps editor Brian Boyer, assistant editor for interactive news at The New York Times, Jacqui Maher, and Media Factory, Latin America’s first venture capital fund for emerging news organizations.

The 2013 Excellence in Journalism conference kicks off this Friday in Anaheim, California. Sessions of interest to data journalists include: best practices for pulling diversity data from census figures, journalists and coding, and storytelling with Google Maps, which provides an introduction to Google Earth and Google Fusion tables. SPJ’s Journalist’s Toolbox (@journtoolbox) will be tweeting live from several of the sessions for those who can’t attend.

The annual PDK/Gallup education poll was published on Wednesday, making this a busy week for data journalists on the education beat. Each year, the poll provides grist for education reporters looking to glean insights about the nation’s public schools. But the Educated Reporter, a blog of the Education Writers’ Association, warns data journalists to proceed with caution when using polling data in education reporting.

A third installment of the TechRaking conference series produced by The Center for Investigative Reporting began on Wednesday. TechRaking III, “Mining the News,” is an invite-only event for journalists and data professionals, co-hosted by Google. Visual.ly will donate $10,000 in development time to help produce the winning project.

Insights and links from the data journalism beat

Data science in the public interest is en vogue, as collaborations between data scientists, nonprofits and human rights groups are springing upeverywhere. Journalists at the Knight Foundation are following suit. This week, the foundation gave details about it’s $2 million Knight News Challenge for health-related data projects. The “inspiration phase” launching next month invites citizens, journalists, and community groups anywhere in the world to dream up ideas about how to turn public data sets into useful information that could improve the health of communities.

Over at the Neiman Journalism Lab, a journalism professor writes that we are now entering the age of the “Digital Media Data Guru,” a person with a hybrid of computer science and journalism skills who is able to “do it all” in the newsroom, and recommends that journalism schools prepare students for the data-centered work ahead of them.

The news app editors at ProPublica have developed another digital tool for your data journalism kit. Upton is a new open-source web scraping framework that makes web scraping easier by providing reusable components. (And it’s named after the great muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair!)

Notes and links from the data journalism beat

It seems that new data journalism tools are being released every day. The latest data journalism tools include: CivOmega, a modular prototype for government data that allows developers to plug in their own APIs and Fact Tank, a new data journalism platform from the Pew Research Center. Also, for journalists in the US concerned about protecting their own personal data, government investigators now face more hurdles when seeking a reporter’s records. And for a little data journalism levity, check out the latest project from Noah Veltman, a data journalism fellow at the BBC. Veltman used the GovTrack Bulk data API, SQL and Python to conduct a self-described “overly in-depth analysis” of Congressional Acronym Abuse from 1973 to the present.

Introducing Fact Tank: An Interview with Pew Research Center President Alan Murray (Data Driven Journalism)
Obviously, we collect vast amounts of data, about demographics, about a variety of issues – we are basically a data shop. In the past, most of the dissemination of our data has been done through existing media. But we also felt it was important for us to get our own data relating to news events out to the public more quickly and more directly. Additionally, we also felt it was important for us to play a role in aggregating data sets which we can then present ourselves.”